Learning from Natural Language Explanations for Generalizable Entity Matching

Somin Wadhwa, Adit Krishnan, Runhui Wang, Byron C Wallace, Luyang Kong


Abstract
Entity matching is the task of linking records from different sources that refer to the same real-world entity. Past work has primarily treated entity linking as a standard supervised learning problem. However, supervised entity matching models often do not generalize well to new data, and collecting exhaustive labeled training data is often cost prohibitive. Further, recent efforts have adopted LLMs for this task in few/zero-shot settings, exploiting their general knowledge. But LLMs are prohibitively expensive for performing inference at scale for real-world entity matching tasks.As an efficient alternative, we re-cast entity matching as a conditional generation task as opposed to binary classification. This enables us to “distill” LLM reasoning into smaller entity matching models via natural language explanations. This approach achieves strong performance, especially on out-of-domain generalization tests (10.85% F-1) where standalone generative methods struggle. We perform ablations that highlight the importance of explanations, both for performance and model robustness.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.352
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6114–6129
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.352
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.352
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Somin Wadhwa, Adit Krishnan, Runhui Wang, Byron C Wallace, and Luyang Kong. 2024. Learning from Natural Language Explanations for Generalizable Entity Matching. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6114–6129, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning from Natural Language Explanations for Generalizable Entity Matching (Wadhwa et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.352.pdf